PostmarketOS is the only linux distro I have used on my pinephone, pinephone pro, and android phones because of how well the distro is maintained. Indeed, the mainline-first approach encourages the community to enact best practices. If you are convinced of the importance of mainlining and postmarketOS’s approach, here is how you can help:

I appreciate megi’s work as a start but we need to mainline devices to have a polished experience long term. If postmarketOS merged heavily forked kernels for devices, a lot of work would need to be done to maintain those devices. More likely, we wouldn’t bother and have severely insecure devices after a couple years. The large initial investment of mainlining is worth it.

All of the important content I create on the internet goes on federated, free network services. Listing these free network services (and their proprietary “equivalents”): peertube (youtube), pleroma (twitter), and sourcehut (github). People seem to look at the number of people on a social media site and assume the one with the most users are the only ones worth having. If the site is proprietary, you have no control over the algorithm and it’s unlikely that the algorithm will prioritize your content over content that benefits the corporate interests. If people could “organically” grow on these proprietary network services, what incentive would there be to buy ads and pay them? The proprietary network services’ business model works against the incentives of organic growth.

In contrast, on Free network services, my content has seen a tremendous amount of organic growth. When Sxmo was a very young project, Drew Devault (creator of Sourcehut) made Sxmo a featured project on Sourcehut and posted in on his Mastodon (federated Twitter) account. The popularity of Sxmo is partly a consequence of how much it embraces free network services to communicate and promote itself. Administrators and users of Free network services are usually thrilled to have your content and help you in promoting it!

Moreover, the design of the Free services encourages organic growth - without payment! When joining Mastodon, you must choose an instance which controls the rules and interests the instance is targetting ². Since Mastodon follows the fediverse structure - you can talk to people on other instances and they can talk to you. However, the “local timeline” shows people on your instance and posts on the local timeline will likely be things your instance finds interesting. So art instances have art and technology instances have cool projects people are working on. Rather than being another drop in the firehose that is the twitter timeline, the local timeline connects you to the people most likely to have the same interests as you. The consequences of these design decisions are profound. I regularly get interactions, suggestions, ideas, and contributions from a diverse group of people. Moreover, the content I get to see on Free network services is more interesting because it’s not constant culture war and brand posting ³.

People will see news stories about the massive load big tech’s network service have on the planet ⁴ and assume that this is the cost of storing their pictures of brunch. Indeed, Google has requested aquifer water to cool their datacenters from water famished regions of the United States ⁵. Most of these data center’s resources are dedicated to serve targetted advertisement. That is, a social media that has no targetted advertisements and mechanisms to prevent advertisements - ie. free software and federation, will be more eco-friendly.

Furthermore, often users will conclude the operational costs of Google and Facebook are how much it costs to run a social media company. Again, this is misleading cause most of the operational costs are spent on advertising the network, UX/UI research to manipulate people into acting against their own self interests, lobbying for exploiting the environment, and analysis of user behavior. Without the need for mass surveillance, targetting, and advertising - Social media can and is run by everyday people using Free software network services.

Moderation is difficult because one person’s rightful ban is another person’s censorship. Luckily, the federated and instance driven nature of the Fediverse allows for nuance in the “free speech” debate. Recall on the fediverse, a core feature is the ability to talk to people on other servers and even other social media platforms. Suppose a fediverse program or instance admin introduces ads or does moderation in a way you dont approve of but all your friends dont want to migrate. You dont have to choose between supporting bad moderation or losing all your friends, you can change instances and still talk to friends on your old instance. The ease of migration makes the whole network much more likely to follow the user’s wishes.

Since each instance has a moderator team and instances are usually small, I have found the moderation on the fediverse to be much better. You can talk to the people doing the moderation and often the administrator will contact you directly regarding their decisions.

The fediverse is how social media on the internet should have happened. It encourages free association with moderation managed communally - join Debian’s instances, your university’s instance, or run your own! Lets support the fediverse and ourselves by joining!

Going through the process of unlocking the bootloader, I am reminded why I was so excited for the pinephone and Librem 5. To unlock the bootloader: you must insert your sim card into your poco f1, make a Xiaomi account with your phone number, and beg Xiaomi to unlock your device via the proprietary windows only application ². Xiaomi’s unlocking application did not detect that my poco f1 was connected and I had to install the “Mi PC Suite”. I downloaed Mi PC Suite from here but be advised that the website is not served over https and overall kind of suspect. I used this program because I could not find a reliable source for the USB drivers for this device after searching for hours. Unlocking the bootloader took me 4 hours in total and it was a painful experience. I will probably have to reinstall windows on my burner laptop.

I was told that Xiaomi sometimes makes people wait a couple of weeks to unlock their phone and during that time, they must use the phone with the simcard installed. In other words, an even bigger privacy nightmare than what I went through. Luckily, I didn’t have to deal with Xiaomi denying my unlock request.

Consulting the postmarketOS wiki for the Oneplus 6/6T, Im not sure if the bootloader unlocking experience is better on the Oneplus 6.

Flashing TWRP to my phone via adb was trivial.

PostmarketOS gained support for calling in the stable branch after I got my poco f1 and the distro has prebuilt images for the poco f1. However, I like customizing my install via pmbootstrap and followed the wiki to find out which panel my device had and made sure pmbootstrap installed the right image. Overall, installing postmarketOS+Sxmo with full disk encryption was no issue.

I used rsync to copy my $HOME directory and /etc/apk/world from my pinephone to the poco f1. The notch was a bit annoying but Vitali64 told me I can add bar { gaps 42 0 } to my sway config to make sure the notch doesnt cover up UI elements. Ideally, we will have gap support preconfigured for users in Sxmo via our deviceprofiles ³.

Calling support for devices other than the pinephone is supported in the git head of sxmo-utils when callaudiod and pipewire is installed. I installed the git head of sxmo-utils and ran apk add callaudiod pipewire.

I use my phone for the following things:

1. Calling and texting
2. Firefox: reading rss via miniflux, watching videos via invidious/sxmo’s youtube script, and reading fediverse posts
3. Dino: messaging friends and family on XMPP
4. Neomutt: reading emails
5. mpv: listening to music with my bluetooth headphones

I will be daily driving my poco f1 while I wait for the pinephone pro to gain mainline support in postmarketOS ⁷. Other than the robocall issue, I don’t find any of the issues to be “show stoppers”. It would be nice to have the camera working and gps working on the poco f1 but the experience is impressive so far. The main issue I face day to day is the DTMF tones. Sxmo users can expect better support for poco f1 and other devices as a result of me having a non pinephone device to test.

If you want to help support the SDM845 mainlining effort, see the postmarketOS wiki page https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon_845_(SDM845). We are very close to the days when we can buy cheap phones like we do cheap Thinkpads off ebay and install a privacy respecting OS.

1. Use Free software

   This should be self explanatory but you should start by using as much Free software as you can. Maybe the phone operating system that is easy to develop for and Free software cannot make phone calls. All software starts off with missing crucial features! If the software already worked and had everything you wanted, there would be nothing to add ². So look at Free software with an open mind and think of creative ways to use Free software that isn’t really working.

   For example, with postmarketOS, alot of phones have wifi working but dont have calls working. As such, you can use an old phone that is just gathering dust in your drawer as a media server. While you use the software, you will find stuff you want to fix, add, and by using the software you will learn how it’s put together.

2. Join the irc/matrix/xmpp chatroom

   This is where you can get real time help about what your working on. Most Free software projects use irc and it’s kind of hard to get into so I will cover it here: As long as you follow irc etiquette, no one will get upset with you. To use irc, I can recommend chat.sr.ht, simply navigate to that site and login with your sourcehut account ³. You can get a sourcehut account for free if you dont have one.

   The irc chatroom is helpful if you need help with sending your changes, implementing your fix, or getting the code to compile.

3. Look at the issue tracker and stuff tagged as “good first issues”

   The “good first issue” tag is very important. Often, when I come across a fascinating new project and I want to poke around in the code, I check the issue tracker for “good first issues”. In the project description or comments, there might be a maintainer that explains how this problem should be solved. If you want your code to be merged into the main branch, you should follow these steps. Going into the code and trying to solve these issues encourages me to read the code critically rather than just skimming. Reading other people’s code is a crucial skill and a great way to learn how to become a better programmer ⁴. Additionally, you get a hit of dopamine when your change gets merged.

   The important thing to recognize here is to just get something mostly working and ask intelligent questions if you’re stuck ¹. The goal is to not write perfect code on the first try alone. The goal is to write code that is good enough that others can build off. I have posted alot of patches that didnt work so I added a “WIP” with what doesnt work and a couple weeks later, someone managed to salvage my code into something work ⁵.

By doing enough good first issues (1-3), you get a good understanding of the codebase and are able to implement that feature you always wanted! In this case, the maintainers and people in the irc channel will be happy to help you since they know you are a determined hacker.

These are the steps I usually take when finding a new project to contribute to. The main call to action for maintainers here is two-fold:

1. Make sure your community is welcoming

   The community you have will follow the leadership. Although Free software is the most egalitarian form of computing, a lot of people in the community will still consider the behavior of the maintainer as what is acceptable. So set a good example: warn people who don’t follow the rules, and ensure people who violate your rules repeatedly are banned from your chatroom/issue tracker/etc. New contributors are hard to come by so treat them well!

2. Document your issue tracker properly

   The goal of the issue tracker is not to have 0 issues. So if an issue is 7 years old, with documentation of workarounds and it’s still a problem, leave it open! Moreover, if you see an issue that would help on board a new contributor, set the “good first issue” label and write a description/comment on how it should be fixed. If you have an issue that is not for a first time contributor but you don’t have time to fix - set a “help wanted” label and write a description/comment on how it should be fixed.

   A good example of an issue tracker that does this well is the pmboostrap issue tracker.

skiptofade.lua skips til a black screen appears. This allows you to skip intros to shows very easily by pressing a keybinding. The default keybinding to run this macro is b.

nextfile.lua allows you to open the next or previous file from the directory the video currently open. As such, when an episode finishes, you can press shift+RIGHT to go to the next episode.

When you close a video, history-bookmark.lua will save a .mpv.history file in the directory from which the video is located. Next time you open any file in that directory with mpv, history-bookmark.lua will prompt you to continue the last episode you watched from that directory. Pressing ENTER will jump to the last episode you watched in that directory, pressing n or doing nothing will resume the episode you originally opened. After adding save-position-on-quit to your mpv.conf and setting up a nfs share to share your media directory, you are able to sync your media watching history across devices.

webm.lua allows you to easily make webms using clips of stuff you are viewing via mpv. Press Shift+w to open up the onscreen instructions and activate the script’s keybindings. This script allows you to easily share funny clips of shows you are watching with your friends. webm.lua is the easiest webm generator I have used.

Putting save-position-on-quit in your mpv.conf only updates your “watch later” data when mpv closes. autosave.lua is a simple script that periodically updates your “watch later” data. It’s very useful in case mpv crashes, Xorg/wayland crashes, etc.

mpv is the best video player and I always want to use it to watch videos. I use invidious to look browse videos without youtube’s bloated and privacy invading ui ¹. The Firefox plugin: Open with allows you to easily open links with another browser. I have add “mpv” as an application I want to open links with so that I can take advantage of all the scripts above whenever I’m watching a video on the internet.

Opening videos with mpv is even easier in qutebrowser.

Remember to install yt-dlp, the successor to youtube-dl so that you can use mpv with most websites that serve video.

What are your favorite mpv scripts? Feel free to leave a comment in my public inbox!

• https://man.sr.ht/~anjan/sxmo-docs
• https://man.sr.ht/~anjan/sxmo-docs-next
• https://man.sr.ht/~anjan/sxmo-docs-stable

• https://git.sr.ht/~anjan/sxmo-docs
• https://git.sr.ht/~anjan/sxmo-docs-next
• https://git.sr.ht/~anjan/sxmo-docs-stable

You might be wondering why I did this. Often, I will fix the documentation in the stable version of the wiki (sxmo-docs) but since the git HEAD version of the code has that change too, I want to be able to rebase sxmo-docs-next on top of my commits to sxmo-docs. Clearly this is a case where I would use git rebase. Setting up the wiki and git repos like this, I am able to have one local repo on my machine with two branches and update both wikis with git-rebase git-push.

So locally, I have setup my remotes like this:

$ git remote -v
devel   git@git.sr.ht:~anjan/sxmo-docs-next (fetch)
devel   git@git.sr.ht:~anjan/sxmo-docs-next (push)
origin  git@git.sr.ht:~anjan/sxmo-docs (fetch)
origin  git@git.sr.ht:~anjan/sxmo-docs (push)
stable  git@git.sr.ht:~anjan/sxmo-docs-stable (fetch)
stable  git@git.sr.ht:~anjan/sxmo-docs-stable (push)

And my branches are setup like this:

$ git branch
* develop
   master
   stable

I can add commits to the master branch and use git push origin master to update the edge docs. To update the development docs, I checkout the develop branch and use git push develop develop to update the develop docs. To update the docs in postmarketOS stable, I checkout the stable branch and use git push stable stable to update the postmarketOS stable docs. I can always rebase the develop branch on top of changes to the master branch.

As such, we can move our old xinitrc that launches programs (dwm, sxhkd, redshift, mpd, etc) to $HOME/.xsession and startx will run /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc It is recommended to use .xsession over .xsessionrc ^{1 , 2}.

mv $HOME/.xinitrc $HOME/.xsession

Note: the file $HOME/.xinitrc should not exist so that /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc is ran.

Finally! We have dwm working with dbus. More importantly, as the distro maintainers determine other boilerplate commands that need to be run in xinitrc, your setup will automatically load those commands.

Proponents of the current mass surveillance state are quick to point out that there is a trade off between security and privacy. The argument is - we live in such a dangerous world, we need to trade all if not most of our privacy for some sense of security. However, in this “trade off”, there is no criterion for when the surveillance state has failed. Recall in January 2021, thousands of Trump supporters raided the capitol hill building. No one in the mainstream media has suggested that the world’s most well funded and well equiped mass surveillance state had failed at preventing this insurrection. Quite the opposite, every single national threat is treated as an advertisement for further privacy violations even though previous privacy violations have not delivered on their promises of security. There must be discussion of a criterion for when the surveillance state has overstepped and criterion for ending the surveillance program in order to properly address this trade off. When politicians bring up security without this criterion, it is a method of sandbagging and fearmongering to prevent further discussion.

After the capitol hill insurrection, many people drew a contrast between how black lives matter was treated by the police state in the Summer of 2020 versus the insurrectionists on capitol hill. Even though the vast majority of black lives matter protests were peaceful, they were treated unjustly by the police state in many cases This was partly because of racial prejudice that exists in the justice system but also because black lives matter protestors were actively calling for the defunding of police. To protect their massively inflated budgets, the police state unfairly targeted black lives matter. It’s not the danger these events presented that called for the amount of force used in each event but their political ambitions. In many cases, the FBI would use facial recognition to find people participating in the black lives matter protests that had not paid bail. It’s likely that the fear of surveillance caused the same communities most effected by the police state, unable to exercise their rights for change. Self-censorship as a result of intimidation by the surveillance state is scarier than any state censorship because self-censorship is largely invisible. When the state censors a book, it makes the library’s “National Banned Books” list and it often causes the material to be more popular than before ¹. However, the self-censor is more brutal than any censor could ever be - state that the library will provide police with records of which patrons take out which books and watch as the most controversial books are left unread ².

Self-censorship means reading your own text with the eyes of another person, a situation where you become your own judge, stricter and more suspicious than anyone else. You the author know what no outside censor could ever discover: your most secret, unspoken thoughts which nonetheless you feel must be obvious to others “between the lines”… Therefore, you attribute to this imaginary censor faculties which you yourself do not possess, and to the text a significance which it actually does not have. For your alter ego pursues your thoughts ad absurdum, until the dizzy end where everything is subversive, where to tread is dangerous and condemnable.

Source: The Most Dangerous Censorship - Edward Snowden

This self censorship is more pervasive and should scare anyone that values democracy. One cannot state that citizens have a right to protest and right to read (among other rights) if the intimidation presented by mass surveillence is so great that citizens are afraid to exercise those rights.

In a Canadian context, the CSIS (Canadian spy agency) often spends it’s valuable resources intimidating climate change activists and first nations communities ³. Climate change is a national security threat and will cause massive social unrest. However, with society’s psychology surrounding the causes of social unrest, it is likely that this will be blamed on people having too much privacy rather than our inability to discuss the root cause of these issues. In the pursuit of peace with justice, we must acknowledge mass surveillance for what it is - a tool to preserve the status quo and silence movements for change that address the root cause of issues.

go-sendxmpp is a command line replacement for mail command on linux. It allows reading in from stdin and sending xmpp messages to anyone on the xmpp network including multi user chatrooms. The original program was written in perl but I could not package it for alpine linux. I prefer the go implementation because it compiles into a single binary that I can copy to all my machines. Go’s binaries are statically linked by default so if most of my system is falling apart, it’s more likely I will get a message that my system is falling apart.

The program’s documentation is great for installing and setting up go-sendxmpp. However, there is one mistake in the documentation as it says the config file must contain:

username: <your_jid>
jserver: <jabber_server>
port: <jabber_port>
password: <your_jabber_password>

My xmpp server uses default settings so I was able to get go-sendxmpp working with:

username: <your_jid>
password: <your_jabber_password>

Since this file will stored unencrypted ¹ on multiple possibly insecure computers, it is wise to make a new jabber account to send yourself notifications.

I am using sxmo on my pinephone which allows the user to define commands to run when the phone receives a call or text. Most people use this feature to setup a script to switch to the speaker sink, set volume to 100%, and tell mpv to play a ringing sound. My android phone required constant babysitting where I would have to consider when I cannot have my phone ring (sleeping, before meetings, etc.) and I needed to remember to put my phone on silent. Keeping my phone on silent all the time caused me miss calls and texts because I wouldn’t pay attention to it.

Introducing go-sendxmpp - no babysitting required, I will never miss a call/text, and my phone will never ring at an inopportune times.

go-sendxmpp allows for a universal, easy to setup notification system for all your *nix devices. Furthermore, it shows the advantages of using a unix-like operating system for things that are commonly not tradition unix boxes (ie. your phone).

Try out go-sendxmpp. Can you think of other uses for a service like this? If so, feel free to send an email to my public-inbox.

For a long time, I just didn’t do any analytics because I thought running proprietary javascript (google analytics) was the only way. Not running any analytics has a number of disadvantages:

1. You are not able to debug which pages might be down or not working
2. You don’t have insight into which pages are the biggest burden to serve
3. You don’t know what content attracts visitors
4. You don’t get a hit of dopamine by observing the growth of your blog

I found a solution that gives me insight into my website but preserves user freedom. “GoAccess, is an open source real-time web log analyzer and interactive viewer that runs in a terminal in *nix systems or through your browser”. Basically, goaccess reads in nginx or apache log files and outputs various analytics about your site.

On my server, I run the following command to analyze my nginx logs:

zcat -f /var/log/nginx/access.log*.gz | cat /var/log/nginx/access.log -  | grep -v 192.168.1.0 | goaccess -f -

nginx compresses older access logs into access.log*.gz so I used zcat to decompress and concatenate all the archives. The ip address: 192.168.1.0 represents http requests from my LAN. I only want to analyze traffic on WAN so I excluded 192.168.1.0 by running grep -v 192.168.1.0 where the -v flag “selects non-matching lines”.

When goaccess opens, I select “NCSA Combined Log Format” and press Enter. Finally, I get the following output:

I prefer cli output but you can also get an html webpage to view.

Since IP addresses can be used to track users, I obfuscate ip addresses with nginx. I left “log full ip address on hack / access denied attempts” on as the tutorial suggests. Logging IPs on error allows me to use tools like fail2ban to ban ip addresses that are trying to bruteforce my server. I also setup log rotation to delete my nginx logs older than 7 days. The log data stays on my server and is not exported to any other third party.

Hopefully goaccess gives you more motivation to write!

I prefer orgmode over markdown because already I use orgmode for appointments, reminders, notes, etc. However, most static website generators only support Markdown. Luckily, orgmode has an html export function: M-x org-publish. org-publish is much more powerful and reliable than any markdown converter I have used.

Since 2016, I have been using jekyll which is bloated and requires a lot of ruby dependencies. To make sure my website always built, I setup sourcehut builds to build my jekyll website. Each website build takes 3 minutes on sourcehut.

Building the website locally was also a terrible experience. I had hacked on a shell script that would take my org-publish output and make it usable for jekyll by setting the title and layout variables. To publish a new blog post, I had to: org-publish -> run my script -> commit html AND org file -> wait for jekyll to build on sourcehut. If I had made a mistake, I would repeat the entire process… Eventually this setup was so cumbersome, I stopped blogging.

I do not use most of the features of jekyll and needed something more minimal. In the past, I have dabbled with werc, hugo, and guile-haunt. Eventually, I stumbled upon ssg5 which is a static site generator written in 180 lines of posix compliant shell. If you do not use markdown, ssg5 will only use unix coreutils to make your website with a common header and footer. Perfect!

I decided I should go through the pain of porting my website over to ssg5 and documenting my experience. Here is what I had to pay attention to:

To check mistakes with my website’s rss and html, I used w3c’s validation service for html and rss.

Finally, I had to go back in time and convert all my Markdown posts to orgmode.

My website now generates in under a second for a clean build compared to 3 minutes with jekyll. I don’t have to use jekyll, jekyll’s dependencies, and sourcehut to build my website. Expect more blog posts going into the future!

First, install the crust packages from postmarketos. Note: I assuming you have setup abuild according to Alpine Linux’s creating an Alpine package guide.

Add the following repositories to /etc/apk/repositories:

/home/$BUILDUSER/packages/main/
/home/$BUILDUSER/packages/community/
/home/$BUILDUSER/packages/temp/

Note: Replace $BUILDUSER with the user that will be running abuild.

Next, build the new versions of device-pine64-pinephone, crust, and u-boot-pinephone packages from pmaports’ feature/crust branch:

git clone https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports.git
cd pmaports
git checkout feature/crust

Build the packages for crust using abuild:

cd device/community/device-pine64-pinephone && abuild -r
cd main/crust && abuild -r
cd temp/u-boot-pinephone && abuild -r

We can install these newly built packages by running:

sudo apk update && sudo apk upgrade -a
sudo apk add crust

Finally, as Danct12 says in the crust merge request thread - “upgrading the u-boot-pinephone package isn’t enough, you’ll need to run this in the command line”:

If postmarketos is booting from EEMC:

sudo dd if=/usr/share/u-boot/pine64-pinephone/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin \
of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=1024 seek=8 # for EEMC

If postmarketos is booting from SD card:

sudo dd if=/usr/share/u-boot/pine64-pinephone/u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin \
of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=1024 seek=8 # for SD card

You must reboot to have your changes take affect. To verify that you have installed crust correctly, run the following command and check if your output matches:

pinephone:~$ cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
s2idle [deep]

Crust on sxmo is on an experimental git branch. To update sxmo’s scripts to support crust, run the following commands:

sudo apk add libx11-dev xproto linux-headers # make dependancies for sxmo-utils
git clone https://git.sr.ht/~mil/sxmo-utils
cd sxmo-utils
git checkout f/crust-screenlock-suspend # crust branch
make programs/sxmo_screenlock
sudo cp programs/sxmo_screenlock /usr/bin
sudo apk del libx11-dev xproto linux-headers # remove make dependancies

When you turn off the screen, the LED shows the power status of the phone. Purple is screenoff, red is crust. Triple click volup and you get red (crust). Triple click voldown and you get purple/blue toggle (screenoff/on) On irc pucilpet said: modem is receiving calls and texts but does not “ring”. So you will see the call once unlocked or might even pick it up if you unlock mid-call.

Remember to repeat this process anytime there’s an update to sxmo-utils’ f/crust-screenlock-suspend branch or pmaports’ feature/crust branch. Please document your experience in the pmaports crust merge request - I have notifications on for when commits are pushed. If you have issues with sxmo, drop by #sxmo on irc://irc.oftc.net/ or send a message to the sxmo mailing list.

People often say: distro doesnt matter. To an extent, they are correct. When you are sufficiently experienced with administrating a Linux workstation or server, the distro matters a lot less. However, one area in which a distro has the potential to differentiate itself is packaging. Your distro’s packaging standards and package maintainers will determine system stability and the number of programs you can easily install. When it comes to packaging, Void is head and shoulders above Arch.

After a couple of years of using Arch, I ended up finding the AUR system completely untenable. Most of the packages I use everyday need to be installed from the AUR - freecad, gnu icecat (the only nonbotnet web browser), etc. I don’t consider the AUR part of the Arch repositories because they are not checked by the distro maintainers and the AUR is by-in-large unsupported. The whole point of a packaging system is to have a trusted repository of programs the user can install.

Compare this unsupported AUR system to the void-packages repository where all packages are checked by someone on the Void team. If the package prohibits redistribution (ie. discord), it is still supported by VoidLinux. The user must run xbps-src to package discord on their local machine but the template (analogous to PKGBUILD in Arch) is still checked and maintained in the main Void git repository. Arch is very anemic when it comes to the number of packages available if one ignores the packages in the AUR.

Sometimes a major dependency (ie. libressl) will get an upgrade. This means that all packages that depend on libressl need a revision bump to compile against the newest version of libressl. When this happens, you must rely on the following things to ensure an AUR package or its dependencies do not break:

1. Remember to run yay -Syua
2. Check if the package maintainer is active (read AUR comments for breakage)

Recall Arch does not support partial upgrades so you must upgrade AUR packages constantly. In contrast, Void-packages is similar to the AUR in that it allows any user to maintain a package by submitting a pull request on github. Furthermore, any user can send a pull request to upgrade a package they are using ². All pull requests are checked by a VoidLinux team member and if the binary is not too large, it is hosted on the official voidLinux repo servers and installable for all void users via the main package manager. If you submit a package and its makedependancy gets an upgrade, the person updating the makedependancy will revision bump your package and post the new working revision in the official Void repositories.

I am not timid about my love for free software. I try to use as much free software as possible but to live in this world, I have to use some proprietary software. On Arch the free and nonfree packages are in one repository. All this creates a distro which hides the problem of proprietary software on your system. On VoidLinux, there is a separate non-free repository similar to Debian. If you don’t install the metapackages that enable nonfree repositories, you have no nonfree software on your computer other than some proprietary firmware. Furthermore, you can easily check how nonfree your system is and work to fix the problem areas. Seperating free and nonfree packages is important as it shows the distro recognizes the ideals of software freedom.

The ever growing scope of the systemd project is troubling. Large and ever growing software projects inevitably have large security vulnerabilities and reliability issues. Consider projects that have a hard requirement on systemd (ie. Gnome). This hard requirement should be troubling for anyone that wants a Linux ecosystem that is diverse.

Instead of systemd, VoidLinux uses runit as its official init. Runit starts up and shuts down my computers faster than systemd.

The Void installer is an easy to use ncurses wizard.

Try it void!

Check out its awesome handbook!

On postmarketos, gnome-authenticator is my preferred two factor authentication app because it is in the main repositories and it works. However, debian is currently a much better experience daily driving. I’ve fixed a couple of issues in postmarketos and I’d love to use it but right now I need an os that works¹.

Debian lacks a package for gnome-authenticator. I tried installing gnome-authenticator from flatpak and the app did launch but adding a provider caused the app to crash. Launching gnome-authenticator a second time caused a giant error and the app never opened again ².

Using the command line on the pinephone is a pain. I often leave my phone upstairs and when a totp/hotp challenge appears in my web browser, I have to walk upstairs and get the totp pin. However, if I use a command line two factor application, I can simply ssh and get the otp.

Currently, I use gopass and I found a simple application that integrates with gopass: pass-otp ³. Furthermore, pass-otp has support for importing my android otp client’s (freeotp) uri backup.

Installing pass-otp on debian is as simple as running:

sudo apt install pass-extension-otp

The rationale for sudoedit is that text editors are complex programs that could cause damage if given unchecked root access. As such, it’s better to use the cp command to copy the file so that a non-root user can edit it, run your editor as a non-root user to edit the file, and on exit run cp to overwrite the original file with the user edited file. To make a sudoedit with doas, you can make a wrapper copy files around.

However, if you use emacs, you can easily create a sudoedit replacement for doas. TRAMP for emacs supports doas. As such, I add the following to my .bashrc:

doasedit(){
    emacsclient -nw /doas::${1}
}

Running doasedit <filename> now allows you to edit the file like sudoedit!

On Voidlinux, sudo is part of the base-system group. If we want to remove sudo, we must tell xbps that sudo can be substituted by doas.

To substitute doas for sudo, I edited /etc/xbps.d/99-my-settings.conf and added:

virtualpkg=sudo:opendoas

See man xbps.d for more details on the virtualpkg keyword.

To remove sudo, we can now run:

doas xbps-remove sudo

1. doas mastery on tedunangst.com

This was the most frustrating issue I ran into. When I tried to install the latest AMD driver for my RX 580, the screen of my windows guest would go black and I would never see the windows desktop again.

A common fix for this issue is changing to the Q35 chipset in your setup of your virtual machine ¹. However, this did not completely fix my issue. Another thing I had to do to get the driver install working was setting up UEFI firmware on the virtual machine. Unfortunately, there was a bug that was introduced in the newer versions of libvirtd on arch that caused libvirtd to not recognize my installed OVMF ². So after I made sure I had installed OVMF using this guide, I downgraded libvirtd to version 5.6.0.

Finally, I was able to create a new virtual machine in virt-manager (using UEFI and Q35 chipset), install windows in the virtual machine, and update my guest AMD GPU driver. Note: you can upgrade to the latest libvirtd after you have installed windows.

This is a bug in the game but it’s exasperated by me not using CPU pinning as described here: Archwiki - PCI passthrough via OVMF: Performance Tuning - CPU pinning

I have a AMD Ryzen 7 1700 and used 4c/2t AMD CPU example (Before ComboPi AGESA) from the CPU pinning guide. Setting up CPU pinning fixed this issue.

To troubleshoot these issues, I had to reinstall Windows approximately 10 times. To speed up the process, I made a copy of windows’ qcow2 file on my host. Anytime windows would break, I would copy over the working copy before I tried something. Of course, this method only works if you have your chipset and UEFI firmware set correctly when you first created and installed windows on your virtual machine qcow2.

This is a very handy method to babysit windows. I am paranoid about when I have a solidworks project I’m working on and a Windows update breaks my system. This is the original reason I setup Windows in a VM.

Sourcehut is my git hosting platform of choice. Sourcehut offers a continious integration platform called builds.sr.ht. Here is how to setup build.sr.ht to compile android projects with gradle.

Before we begin, we need to create the android-sdk-license build secret. This file will tell the android build service (gradle in this guide) that you have agreed to all the required licenses for the dependancies upon which your project depends.

If you have built your android apps on your pc, you already have this file and are ready to go. Open up sr.ht build secrets. Select Secret Type: File and enter the following details for your new secret:

Name: androidLicense

Path:  ~/android/licenses/android-sdk-license

Mode: 644

Click browse and navigate to where you have installed the android sdk on your local machine. Upload the file called android-sdk-license in the folder licenses.

Finally, in sr.ht build secrets, click Add Secret.

On the right pane, a new secret should appear. There should be a UUID that represents the license file you just uploaded. When you include this UUID in your build manifest, android-sdk-license will be copied to the correct folder in your build environment.

If you would like to send your built apks to a vps, make sure you add your ssh config (nonstandard ports) and a new ssh private key to your secrets.

Finally, we have to make the .build.yml file on the root of your git repository on your local machine. You can use sr.ht to lint and check whether your app will build on a clean machine with the latest version of gradle (build). I take it one step further and upload my unsigned build to my vps (deploy). This creates fresh unsigned builds for the latest commit of my app.

Here is my .build.yml from my own project lift: a free software workout app.

# I use archlinux for my image because I want to test whether my app
# builds with the latest release of gradle. Features are often deprecated on
# android and I did not know that my app was using alot of deprecated features
# until I tried to build with the latest version of gradle.
image: archlinux
packages:
  - gradle
  - rsync
# The sr.ht git repo that contains my application. Enter your own app's git repo here
sources:
  - https://git.sr.ht/~anjan/lift
environment:
  deploy: deploy@momi.ca
secrets:
# UUIDs for ssh and android license secrets
  - 88e37d5a-6a50-4a14-b9d5-a944dc17bf50
  - b0ee6bc9-84d5-4962-a8cb-fc0a9e002bfa
  - 336f1246-50a2-464a-b3fe-1b54cba37a45
# Tell builds to send me an email if the build fails
triggers:
  - action: email
    condition: failure
    to: Anjandev Momi <anjan -at- momi.ca>
tasks:
  - build: |
      export ANDROID_SDK_ROOT=~/android
      cd lift
      gradle assemble
  - deploy: |
      cd lift/app/build/outputs/apk/debug
      sshopts="-o StrictHostKeyChecking=no"
      rsync --rsh="ssh $sshopts" -rP . ${deploy}:/srv/http/android/android

Finally, add this file in git, commit, and push to sr.ht. Your build should begin!

Be advised, you will not be able to install the apk that is rsynced by your .build.yml until you sign it using something like jarsigner. I do not sign my latest commit builds because they are strictly for myself.

You could generate a keystore using jarsigner, upload it as a secret to sr.ht build secrets, and then add a couple extra lines before rsyncing to sign the app using jarsigner. However, I would prefer to use fdroid’s build tools at that point. Please do not store large files on sr.ht - use a different git host. The documentation for fdroid’s build tools are here: f-droid: publishing nightly builds

When sr.ht supports large files, I will write a blog post about using f-droid build tools on sr.ht.

An article about computational result is advertising, not scholarship. Actual scholarship is the full software environment, code and data, that produced the result. - Claerbout and Karrenbach, Proceedings of the 62nd Annual International Meeting of the Society of Exploration Geophysics. 1992

The issue of computational result being present as scholarship is common today. When a study reviewed 613 papers in eight computer science conferences and five ACM journals, they found they could only reproduce 24.9% ². As an anecdote: I have seen plenty of articles where the code is not available or the code is proprietary. The lack of reproducibility in science is related to a number of other issues but in this post, I would like to detail one: studies often present results that were generated using proprietary software. As a result of scholars using software that does not guarantee the four essential freedoms, distribution and investigation is limited. Consequently, reproducibility is hindered. Furthermore, scholars often neglect publishing the in-house code used to generate the results. As a result, readers cannot run and inspect the software on their own computers.

Reproducible research is academic research where the final result contains the publication of everything that was used in the project: including notebooks and full computational environment. This computational environment includes: the code, data, etc used to produce the academic work ^{3 , 4}. In other words, reproducible research implores scholars to use and write software that guarantees its users the following essential freedoms ^{4 , 5}:

1. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
2. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2).
4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The prevalence of proprietary software in academia is a threat to the legitimacy of academia. The programs used and their source code should be expected in the Materials and Methods section of an academic article alongside the four essential freedoms.

In the 2010 issue of Economic Review, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff (RR) published a paper whose conclusions favoured austerity. Specifically, it was concluded that a given country’s GDP declines by two percent when “gross external debt reaches 60 percent of GDP” and when external debt is greater than 90%, GDP growth is halved ⁶. The paper was published in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash and was widely cited by Paul Ryan’s Republican Party Budget and British MP George Osborne ^{7 , 8}.

Whatever your political leanings may be, the paper has multiple methodological flaws ⁹. Hermon, Ash and Pollin (HAP) requested the code and data. HAP published a rebuttal which showed a coding error that resulted in the results ignoring data from several countries ⁷. RR conceded that this coding error had been made ¹⁰.

Beyond quality, this case study portrays the threat that irreproducible research has towards society. If HAP did not have the freedom to check RR’s research, we might still be operating under the conclusions of the paper.

Free software is about having control over the technology we use in our homes, schools and businesses, where computers work for our individual and communal benefit.¹¹

Free software is necessary to create a free society in which we are able to criticize the decisions which are generated by computers.

On a larger scale, the issue of proprietary software restrictions appears in many ordinary computer labs. Students are at the mercy of their institutions to use whatever software is installed. It may be the industry standard, but the benefits associated with being the industry standard end when students want to learn and critique the decisions the software makes in their lives. Restrictions are rampant with proprietary software, and non free software often resists reverse engineering to prevent discovering how calculations are done. Indeed, the license restrictions threatens the user with monetary and/or legal repercussions for investigating the system. Common examples are Matlab, Solidworks, Eagle, ANSYS. In this way, proprietary software is a threat to the social mission of school itself: “to teach students to be citizens of a strong, capable, independent, cooperating and free society” ¹².

Free software has an exclusive feature that it guarantees to students: the freedom to learn ¹³. Scholars are not to be blamed for prevalence of proprietary software in schools. Proprietary software is entrenched in society today and we cannot control the circumstances we grow up in. Going forward, it is up to educators to recognize the threat proprietary software poses to society, and promote software that does social good. Indeed, educators can lead in making software freedom the industry standard.

In an ideal world, all the software used in a study (including its dependencies ie. the operating system and programming language) would be released as free software. Freedom in software at this point will come gradually. For example, if you must use Matlab, please consider publishing your scripts under a free license ^{13 , 14}.

If you are making a study, please commit yourself to using as much free software that is available and you have time to transition to. I hope this article serves as an introduction to why software freedom matters in academia. Precisely, the future of academia, its legitimacy, and its ability to criticize the system we live under is at risk.

This post was inspired by this video. Special thanks to Evan Misshula for describing the issue of reproducible science and its relation to software freedom. Please note: I love emacs but reproducible research is not as difficult as learning emacs and using it for your research. In the first half Evan Misshula’s talk, he recommends other free software projects with lower barriers to entry that are also committed to helping scholars create reproducible research. For notebooks that encourage radical reproducibility: jupyter Rmarkdown

Other notable projects for scholars include: http://www.runmycode.org/ and ².

Of course, I am available via email: anjan -at- momi.ca for free software recommendations =).

Further readings with recommendations are in the footnotes. Notably: ^{2 , 4 , 3}.

I use proprietary software for my academic work. I use ansys, matlab, solidworks, etc. Proprietary software is entrenched in society and the free software movement has a lot of work to do. This is an article to make other scholars aware of software freedom and what it can do for academia.

guest editor: Colin Leitner http://www3.telus.net/colinl333

Instagram’s terms of service states: by uploading your art to instagram, “you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings).”

Instagram says you may revoke this license by deleting your content but if someone shares the content, the license is not revoked. If your instagram post is even marginally popular, instagram will own your content forever. They are free to profit, appropriate, and perverse your ideas without paying you anything or crediting you. Unfortunately, most other corporate social media websites have a similar clause in their terms of service.

For a list of other corporate social media websites and issues buried in their terms of service in brief/plain English, see: tosdr. tosdr also has a browser add-on!

Edit 2020-04-21: For proof you don’t own anything you post on instagram see: Court Rules Photographer Gave Up Exclusive Licensing Rights by Posting on Instagram

Shadow banning (also called stealth banning, ghost banning or comment ghosting[1]) is the act of blocking or partially blocking a user or their content from an online community such that it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned.

Shadow banning - Wikipedia

Contrary to popular belief, shadow banning is not reserved for people testing the limits of our free speech. It’s problematic for YOU if you value your discoverability and creative freedom.

For example, YouTube is known to completely change their algorithm overnight without giving a public statement. The subfeed used to show followers the newest content from creators they had subscribed to in chronological order. Today, the subfeed is “curated” by machine learning algorithms to maximize watch time, which in turn increases ad exposure, and profits for YouTube. Less popular and begnin content is snubbed for more popular content because it’s not profitable to show your followers content they have specifically asked for. When you use corporatist social media, whether or not the content you create is shown to your followers is dependant on an ever-changing business plan.

Rather than creating content that is engaging, new and different, many content creators are distracted by the prospect of trying to figure out the algorithm and game it. As a result, Youtube has turned into a sanitized husk of what it used to be.

The internet was created with decentralization and individual ownership in mind to prevent these and other abuses. Everyone doesn’t need to be crammed into a single platform. Unfortunately, corportations found a way to provide some short term conveniences and the general public did not think about the long term problems associated with a centralized internet.

When most people look you up on the internet, they usually do not search your name on each platform individually like LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. because that would take forever. They will likely use a search engine. As long as you do SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on your own website, you will have just as good, if not better discoverability than displaying your content on a corporate social media website.

You do not need to exist on a platform to exist on the internet. There are software developers that understand the importance of a decentralized internet and have created technical tools to allow non-technical people to take advantage of this decentralization. The small effort required to set up a website worth the value of retaining ownership of your content. You should at least create a website and promote it alongside your twitter/facebook/etc, if not escape the legal grasp of corporate social media altogether.

Furthermore, since these replacements are free and open, they will outlive any proprietary social networking app. Compare how long any new proprietary instant messaging app (AIM, MSN messenger, etc.) has lived when compared to email-a free and open internet technology.

Below are some tools and services you might want to use to distribute your content:

To get unbiased updates from multiple websites in chronological order in one window (aka “follow” your favorite content creators):

• RSSowl - an RSS client
• How I use RSS to avoid YouTube’s curated subfeed

To get your own domain name and email address (like mine: anjan -at- momi.ca): gandi domain registrar

For creating your website, I can recommend WordPress or ghost. Gandi offers a one-click install for Wordpress. If you are more technically inclined, look at jekyll and GitHub pages (it’s free!). Stay away from wix, dreamweaver, etc.

If RSS is too much and you would not like to create your own website, there are social media-like services that still retain your freedom. Consider the alternatives listed here: switching.software

Most of the alternatives listed on here are technologically and legally structured in a way that means they cannot be bought or sold.

The social networks listed are federated, which means there is no single site to buy, just thousands of independent sites linked together. Even if a particular site is sold, its users can move to another independent site on the same network. It would be virtually impossible for anyone to take control of the network as a whole.

On top of all this, the software used is released under perpetual free open licences that make it legally impossible for it to be purchased.

Source: switching.software

License: Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 4.0

I recommend you read what federated and a perpetual free open licences means on the switching.software website. You should be distrustful of any social media service on the internet that is not federated and licensed under a perpetual free open license.

Click here for a list of centralized proprietary services that disappeared overnight

tl;dr: Don’t build your livelihood on someone else’s lawn.

If you know of other abuses that are a consequence of a centralized internet, please let me know. A whole other can of worms: consumers of a certain platform may not even be aware of content outside and are at the mercy of that platform for true news/facts.

guest editor: Colin Leitner http://www3.telus.net/colinl333

The MSE312 term project required teams to design, build and control a pick and place arm to rotate 180◦ pick up a metal puck and rotate 90◦ to drop the target. Mechanical design, electrical and protection circuitry, control system and integration aspects were designed and evaluated for the ultimate goal of the system to perform the required task in the fastest time possible while being robust and reliable.

The mechanical truss arm was constructed using brass rods under project constraints and concep- tualized around minimizing mass moment of inertia, centre of mass close to the axis of rotation and minimal deflection under FEA analysis. Concept selection analysis was performed to appropriately select the final mechanical design. The electronics design consisted of motor circuit drive, electromagnet circuitry, power protection and configuration setup with the apparatus limit switches. The electrical configuration provided a soldered circuit board for 12V power to the system and compatibility with 5V signal which would be used for the PWM control signal of the DC motor and electromagnet. The initial control design evaluated electrical/mechanical system continuous time transfer function which was used to plot the system root locus and evaluate PID controller parameters. Integrating the system with a digital micro controller the system is need take into consideration the Z-domain therefore PID value were tuned to operate with the set sampling period. In integration of the sys- tem using the micro-controller was inter-phased using Simulink. The logic of the control program conceptually used a finite state machine for correct sequential operation of the system. Using the integration of the program final PID values were tuned to two individual sets for each 180◦ and 90◦. The final system performance demonstrated accurate pick and place in a avg. run time of 2.03s with a over damped system response. Designing the system to be over damped was critical as an over- shooting system with varying momentum in the system resulted in unpredictable overshoot values. Attaining close to critical damping response by tuning the system, the motor current flowed in one direction for one interval of travel.

The system was assessed for further improvements on mechanical, electrical, controls and integration subsections to order to evaluate aspects of improvement for the system for further improvements in future similar projects and considerations for integrating a control system.

The full documentation for this project is given here: MSE312 Documentation

RSS (Rich Site Summary; originally RDF Site Summary; often called Really Simple Syndication) is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format².

Basically, RSS was created for an internet before social media. RSS allowed users to get updates from many different websites in one window. You may have seen this image all over the internet:

This is the RSS logo and it means that you can recieve the website’s updates using an RSS reader.

So why is this cool? Well, today’s social networks are “optimized” through machine learning algorithms that no one asked for. Social media websites (twitter, youtube and facebook) no longer display content in chronological order.

RSS allows you to:

• see all your updates in one window
• see updates directly from the authors
• see updates in chronological order
• see 99.9% of website updates as most websites use RSS

So, turns out youtube channels supports RSS. Simply, request an account on my RSS reader and log into my rss reader:

https://momi.ca/rss/

Export your Youtube subscriptions to a .OPML file that you can import with any RSS reader:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6224202?hl=en-GB

In Miniflux (momi.ca/rss/). Click Feeds, then click import, and upload your OPML file.

You can add all the websites/blogs you visit. You do not need to rely on Facebook or Twitter to (badly) aggregate your news.

• Multicore Programming with NI Labview
• Wait (ms) Function
• High Resolution Relative Seconds VI
• Boolean Crossing PtByPt VI
• Probes

• “Wiring a value of 0 to the milliseconds to wait input forces the current thread to yield control of the CPU.” - See “wait (ms)” in required readings
• Using wait (ms) block causes timing issues.
• Use a global timer
• Avoid using sequences

1. Download and install the F-droid appstore. This appstore allows us to get open source apps for free when we would have to otherwise pay for them. Make sure you allow unknown sources when you are prompted to do so.
2. Click the three dots on the top right and tap “update repos”
3. Search for and install DAVdroid and OpenTasks
4. Open up DAVdroid, press the + icon in the bottom right, tap “Log in with URL and user name” and enter:
   1. cal.momi.ca for base url
   2. your given user name for User name
   3. your given password for Password
5. Login and make sure to select default address book and default calendar.

Press the sync icon on the top right whenever you wish to sync

To view your contacts and calendar on windows, I recommend using thunderbird. Although not required, it is also nice to have your email setup with thunderbird as it sends you desktop notifications whenever you get an email. (Google: “[university name/organization name] thunderbird”)

If you assigned different workspaces to different monitors, you may want to change this now:

workspace 1 output DVI-0

Would be changed to:

workspace 1 output DVI-I-0

Similarly, throughout the config where you would have used your old display name (in the example DVI-0), you may now use your new display name (in the example DVI-I-0).

Feh no longer works to set wallpaper. Use the following command in your config for sway to set the wallpaper:

output HDMI-A-1 bg ~/wallpaper.png stretch
output DVI-I-0 bg ~/wallpaper2.png stretch

Start by installing mpd and mpc on your selected distribution. On debian it would be:

sudo apt-get install mpd mpc

Then, make a new user to run mpd so you don’t have to run mpd as root:

sudo adduser mpdstream

Switch to the new user:

su - mpdstream

Create the files for mpd’s data and config:

mkdir .mpd
mkdir .mpd/playlists
touch .mpd/{mpd.conf,mpd.pid,mpd.db,mpdstate,mpd.log}

Open .mpd/config in your favourite text editor and copy paste the following config in there:

music_directory "/mnt/AAE0DC50E0DC247B/Music"
playlist_directory "/home/mpdstream/.mpd/playlists"
db_file      "/home/mpdstream/.mpd/mpd.db"
log_file      "/home/mpdstream/.mpd/mpd.log"
pid_file      "/home/mpdstream/.mpd/mpd.pid"
state_file     "/home/mpdstream/.mpd/mpdstate"

audio_output {
     type  "alsa"
     name  "whatever you want"
     mixer_type "software"
     mixer_control "PCM"
 
}

audio_output {    
    type        "httpd"    
    name        "My HTTP Stream"    
    encoder     "lame"          # optional, vorbis or lame    
    port        "8001"    
    quality     "5.0"           # do not define if bitrate is defined    
#   bitrate     "320"           # do not define if quality is defined    
#   format      "44100:16:1"    
}

filesystem_charset             "UTF-8"
user                "mpdstream"
password                        "YOURPASSWORD@read,add,control,admin"
bind_to_address         "0.0.0.0"

I will only explain the options you will need to change in order to ensure everything works. If you’d like to learn about the other options I entered, please read the documentation for mpd.

music_directory "/mnt/AAE0DC50E0DC247B/Music"

Replace /mnt/AAE0DC50E0DC247B/Music with your music directory.

type "alsa"

Enter your audio output (alsa or pulse).

The second audio output defines the settings for the web output of mpd. Mpd supports playing to multiple outputs so the alsa/pulse output and httpd output can coexist in the same config file.

encoder "lame"

I will only go over how to use lame in this guide as it is the most common, it is the most likely encoder to work with your phone (see mpdroid setup), and it is the easiest to install.

port "8001"

Change this if you want and make note of it.

quality "5.0"

This quality integer is a good compromise for me when it comes to bandwidth used vs. quality.

password "YOURPASSWORD@read,add,control,admin"

Finally, set your password where it says YOURPASSWORD before the "@read,add,control,admin". If my password was spiderman, this line would become:

password "spiderman@read,add,control,admin"

Write and close the config file.

Install lame by running:

sudo apt-get install lame

Make sure you allow the ports for httpd and mpd through your firewall. In my case, the httpd port is 8001 and the mpd port is 6000. So, I ran:

sudo ufw allow 6600/tcp
sudo ufw allow 8001/tcp

Also, if you’d like to use mpd httpd outside of your network, forward these ports in your router.

Make sure no instances of mpd are running by typing killall mpd into the terminal.

Then, type mpd into terminal in order to to start mpd as the user mpdstream.

Download mpdroid from playstore

Tap on Default connection settings

For Host, enter the ip of your router if you’re outside your network. If you’re inside your network, enter the ip of the computer you’re running the mpd server on.

For Port, enter your mpd server port (Since I didnt change it in my config, it’s 6600)

Enter the password for your mpd server

For Streaming host, enter the same ip as you entered for Host.

For Streaming port, enter your mpd streaming port (In my case, it’s 8001).

For streaming url suffix enter mpd.mp3 if you’re using lame as this guide describes. Enter mpd.ogg if you’re using vorbis.

Press back a couple times once you are done configuring and it will try to connect to your server.

Once connected, try to play something and tap the bottom bar with the title of the current song playing. Click the three dots on the top right of the screen and check streaming. If sound doesnt play, know that this is a common bug on android. However, I came up with a work-around:

Download vlc from the playstore.

Tap the three horizontal lines on the top left of vlc and tap stream.

For network address, type http://YOUR_STREAMING_HOST_IP:YOUR_STREAMING_PORT/mpd.mp3

In my case, this would be:

http://192.168.1.100:8001/mpd.mp3 if I was on my internal network.

Now, when you have a song playing in mpdroid, you can tap the ip of your server to listen to it. You treat mpdroid as the remote to pause/change songs and vlc as the app that plays the streamed data.

Music Player Daemon/Tips and Tricks

• Lowest latency
• Best voice quality
• The host is a dedicated computer, not someone in the call.
  • If someone leaves call, the call doesnt end.
  • No one in call has to experience higher latency in game cause theyre host
  • No dropped calls
• Little lag for people talking from across the country
• It’s like a group chat that never ends. You meet new people and it’s fun.
• We have a bot that blasts K-Pop into the server
• There is a text to voice bot that will say ANYTHING you type into chat. (you can turn this off if it’s annoying)

• Download mumble (stable release) for your OS from here.
• Click next, next, next through install wizard.
• Open mumble:

These next settings are important. Please read the recommended settings for the server above each image of the setting

• Click next

• Select your mic and speaker

• Click next

• Adjust slider such that the bar always stays in green area even when your talking quietly (not wanting to wake anyone) or yelling/annoyed. Try your best, if you can’t get it perfect, it’s fine.

• Choose when you want mumble to transmit your voice.

Push to talk - Only send my voice through channel while I hold down a button. Perfect if you always have music playing or family talking. Click on the grey box and press the button you wanna hold down to talk. (I reccomend caps lock as push to talk button)

The other two options basically compare how much sound is coming through mic and transmit if you get loud enough.

• Leave these settings default.

• Do you have headphones?

• Choose whether you’d like to send stats to mumble

• Click on the globe on the top left to connect to my server

• Click Add New

• Enter the credentials we sent to you. (You may choose whatever username and lable you want. I chose momi as my label for the server)

• Click connect while having your label for my server selected.

• Accept the certificate for my server by clicking yes. You will have to do this once.

Install Mumla from Fdroid

Install Mumla from Google Play Store

Install Mumble from Apple App Store

Thats it! you should be in my server talking now. If you ever need to reconfigure your sound, click configure on the top bar and then click audio wizard.

If you need a private room, message me on steam or email me and I can make a private room for you with a password.